Kameron Hurley - God's War

“Five ways is twenty.”

“That assumes we’re all equal. Nasheen’s not a democracy, and neither’s my team.”

“Fifteen. I won’t kill anyone for you.”

“Fifteen, you don’t kill anybody, and you sign a contract today.”

Rhys turned again to look at Yah Tayyib. The old magician moved out of the doorway, back into the darkness.

“Yes,” Rhys said.

She squatted and reached through the ropes for him. He started, expecting violence. Instead, she clasped his elbow. He recovered quickly and clasped hers in turn. And in that one moment, that brief embrace, he felt safe for the first time in more than a year.

“You’ll do all right with me,” Nyx said, straightening.

“You think so?”

She grinned again. Her whole face lit up. It was dynamic. “If you don’t, I’ll cut your fucking head off. It’s what I’m good at.”

“Not so good as all that, if you aren’t a bel dame anymore.”

She caught hold of the ropes and leaned back, still grinning. “A shitty magician and a shitty bel dame. We’re two of a kind, then, aren’t we?”

He wasn’t sure what scared him most: that she was right, or that she was now his employer.

Nyx came out of her year in prison with all of her limbs and organs intact, though she had a new appreciation for open sky and food that hadn’t been grown in a jar. After that, time licked by in a blur of boys and blood. Seven years of putting together a crackerjack bounty hunting team, starting with Taite, her com tech, then her Chenjan magician. Seven years of boys and blood—girls too. Bounty hunters took up notes on girls and women, and that’s all she had a license to be anymore, just another body hacker. Another organ stealer. In Nasheen you hacked out a living or spent your last days hacking out your lungs.

She knew which she preferred.

The war still raged along the ever-changing border with Chenja. Nyx started up her storefront with the dancer and com tech in Punjai, a border city at the heart of the bounty-hunting business. While she was in prison, Punjai had been swallowed by Chenja for six months, then “liberated” by a couple of brilliant Nasheenian magicians and an elite terrorist-removal unit. Chenjan corpses burned for days. All of the city’s prayer wheels were burned and the old street signs were put back up. There had been air raids and rationing and a couple more poisoned waterworks, but, as ever, the war was just life, just how things clicked along—one exhausting burst and bloated body at a time.

It was a fitting way to look at time, Nyx figured, as she opened up her trunk one hazy morning while the yeasty stink of bursts blew in on the wind. She and her team were still three bounties short of rent.

She found a headless body inside the trunk.

“You should have put some towels down,” Rhys said. It had been worth the look on Yah Tayyib’s face the day she signed Rhys, though his cut was still substantially more than anybody else’s on the team.

And she liked his hands.

There had been dog carcasses in the alley behind her storefront this morning, fat rats squealing over tidbits, old women netting roaches for stews. The accumulated filth of rotting tissue, blood, sand, and the stench of human excrement had sent Rhys out onto the veldt for dawn prayer, and Nyx had grudgingly agreed to take the bakkie out to pick him up. She made sure to arrive well after the end of prayer, because watching Rhys praying was about as uncomfortable as the idea of catching him masturbating—if he even did that sort of thing.

In any case, she hadn’t thought to check the trunk.

“Whose is it?” Nyx asked. She was due to pick up a bounty in a quarter of an hour. She needed the trunk space.

The body was draped in the white burnous of a clerk, gold tassels and all. The feet were bare. Though he had no head, a red newsboy cap was cradled under the left arm.

Nice touch, that.

“Khos’s,” Rhys said.

She should have recognized his work.

Nyx glanced over at Rhys, trying to read him. His dark face was pinched and drawn.

She watched him gather his gear. “I’ll put this in the cab. I forgot about the body,” he said.

“Khos won’t get anything without the head.”

“He says the body’s got a birthmark.”

“Khos is an idiot.” Khos, her big Mhorian shifter. Substantial in so many ways. She teased that thought back out of her mind. Shit, it had been a while.

Rhys pinched his mouth. Nyx waited for a word of affirmation, but he said only, “Khos said this one was on the boards for black work. He had me open a file.”

Nyx shut the trunk.

“Somebody’s going to revoke my hunter’s license ’cause Khos can’t burn his bodies,” she said. It wouldn’t be the first time. She’d had her bounty hunter’s license revoked twice in her seven years as a hunter—once for accidentally shooting a diplomat’s assistant, who’d been within range of her actual target, and again for employing Khos without a shifter’s license. Shifters were expensive.

Nyx moved around to the cab of the little bakkie, kicked the latch loose, and propped open the door. She took the driver’s seat, adjusted the sword strapped to her back to make it easier to sit, and pumped the ignition pedal. A growl came from under the hood. She’d gotten the bakkie off a hedge witch working in the fleshpots on the Tirhani border. Nyx knew all about what it was like to be hard up for bugs and bread.

“Hit the grille,” Nyx said. Sometimes you had to get the beetles riled up before they’d feed.

Rhys banged the flat of his hand on the grille. Not much weight behind it. Fucking dancers .

While she waited, Nyx watched a burst from the front ignite across the sky over Punjai. One of the anti-burst guns stowed in the minarets along the perimeter fired. The heavy whump-whump of the guns made her ears pop. The burst burned up over the city. Bursts were a lot prettier from a distance.

“Would you put some shit behind it?” Nyx yelled. “You want to go back to whoring-out portraits?”

Rhys kicked the grille. Better.

The bugs hissed, and something inside the semi-organic cistern belched.

“In, in, let’s go!” Nyx called.

Rhys leapt in as the bakkie began rolling down the dusty hill toward Punjai.

There was a hot desert wind blowing in from the western waste, pushing out the city’s black shroud of smog and settling a misty cloud of red silt over the cityscape. The double dawn had risen; the orange sun overpowered the wan light of the blue sun, and the silt-filtered light caught the world on fire.

Nyx shifted pedals as the road straightened out. They hit gravel, and a couple of roach nymphs wiggled free from the leak in the hose by her feet and flitted through the open windows.

They came over the top of a low rise, and Punjai spread before them like a jagged wound, a seething black groove torn out of the red wash of the veldt. Three years before, the front had been closer, and all of the minarets outside the Chenjan quarter of the city had been bombed. Truckloads of dead and dying men were still carted into the city during the worst of the skirmishes, but for the most part, magicians liked to patch up their charges at the front. The more men that got away from the front, the more likely it was that somebody would figure a way to smuggle them out—and the greater the danger they posed to the city if they were contaminated. Bel dame business was brisk in Punjai. Not that Nyx was licensed to do that type of thing.

But it didn’t keep her from thinking about it.

At the edges of the city, the desert stirred, set free by centuries of bug storms and heavy warfare. Bursts had seared the veldt and carved deep pockets into mud-brick ruins and heaps of rock the color of old blood. At the center of the city rose the old onion-shaped spirals of the remaining minarets, long since converted to more practical watchtowers equipped with long-range anti-burst weapons and scatterguns. The only minaret that still called the faithful to prayer in Punjai was a crumbling black spiral in the Chenjan quarter.